A Philadelphian Restaurateur Flourishes in New York

Stephen Starr, right, last month added Hybird, a fried chicken stand in Chelsea Market, to his ventures, in partnership with Ahmir Khalib Thompson, left, the drummer with the Roots, who is known as Questlove.Credit
Agaton Strom for The New York Times

Stephen Starr unseated Glorious Food last week as the caterer of the New York Botanical Garden Conservatory Ball. It was no small feat for a restaurateur who used to be considered an out-of-towner.

Mr. Starr, who came to New York in 2006 with Morimoto and Buddakan, copies of 2 of his 20 Philadelphia restaurants, served smoked salmon tidbits and little veal meatballs with cocktails at the ball, followed by an Italian menu featuring branzino roasted with fennel for 600 people. To his credit, the food was hot and not overcooked.

“When you have to serve 300 or more, it’s tempting to do airline chicken or salmon,” he said. “But I approach it more as a restaurateur than as a caterer. We cook to order. The food doesn’t sit around warming.”

Mr. Starr, who is based in Philadelphia, has planted his flag in New York on the kinds of museum and concert hall dining rooms that usually belong to Nick Valenti’s Patina Group, Restaurant Associates, Liz Neumark’s Great Performances and Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group.

Stephen Starr Events will start doing the food in the cafes at the Botanical Garden, with an emphasis on herbs and vegetables. His company is also dishing up lamb Tellicherry and Goan spiced clams at Serai, the cafe in the Rubin Museum of Art, which features the art of the Himalayas. And he is serving Italian food at Caffè Storico at the New-York Historical Society.

Winning contracts like these is not easy, and New York is often brutal for out-of-town restaurateurs and chefs. The list of those who have failed is long. But Mr. Starr didn’t swagger into town like some Wyatt Earp with a menu and an attitude that he’s ready to show New York how it’s done. “I get an adrenaline rush just being here,” he said. This fall, he will take charge of the cafes, bars and banquet areas at Carnegie Hall, beginning with the season’s opening night, Oct. 2, when the Philadelphia Orchestra, from his hometown, will perform.

“I just love that it’s Carnegie Hall,” he said.

Catering public spaces is good business, said Richard Coraine, the senior managing partner of the Union Square Hospitality Group, which runs restaurants in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and Citi Field, in part because “there is a built-in audience.”

“It’s a win-win,” he said.

And the food at such sites has improved. “The public’s ability to ascertain the difference between good versus mediocre has ratcheted up,” Mr. Coraine said.

At the Botanical Garden’s ball last week, service was broken down into more manageable restaurant-size areas so each could be handled separately and the quality of the food could be assured, said Simon A. Powles, president of Stephen Starr Events, the company’s catering division.

Mr. Starr got his start as a rock-music promoter. He says there is a connection between the theatricality of that work and developing restaurants. Last month he opened Hybird, a fried chicken stand in Chelsea Market, with Ahmir Khalib Thompson, the drummer with the Roots, who is known as Questlove. This fall he will open a branch of his jazzy Mexican restaurant, El Vez, in Battery Park City.

Each of Mr. Starr’s restaurants has its own style. In Philadelphia, there are Asian, Latino, steak, seafood, farm-to-table, comfort food and Italian places, and even an English gastro pub that has Notting Hill written all over it. None bear the stamp of a corporate entity. Among the designers of these restaurants are David Rockwell, Philippe Starck and Karim Rashid. In New York, for Morimoto, Mr. Starr enlisted the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The job of creating Buddakan went to Christian Liaigre.

Mr. Starr has also given his chefs, including Masaharu Morimoto, considerable leeway. “We have developed a vast culinary team to draw from,” he said. “And in institutional settings, I believe the focus has to be on the food.”

Correction: June 11, 2013

An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misspelled the name of the fried chicken stand in Chelsea Market that Mr. Starr opened with Ahmir Khalib Thompson, who is known as Questlove. Its name is Hybird, not Hybrid.

A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2013, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: An Outsider Is Now an Adopted Son. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe